Guns N’ Roses to play The Palace on Dec. 1

Nothing epitomizes the push-pull dynamic of being a Guns N’ Roses (GNR) fan more than the opening lyrics of “Estranged” (from its 1991 album “Use Your Illusion II”) — “When you’re talkin’ to yourself/And nobody’s home/You can fool yourself.” The good news is the current lineup of GNR, which comes to Detroit on Dec. 1 at The Palace of Auburn Hills, is currently playing that tune.

The bad news is, in many ways singer Axl Rose has been fooling himself for the past decade and a half, thinking his hard rock vocals — not Slash’s raunchy guitar or Izzy Stradlin’s keen songwriting or bassist Duff McKagan (an in-law of former Toledo Mayor Jack Ford) — were solely responsible for turning GNR into the biggest hard rock act in the world in its heyday.

Dizzy Reed

The train derailment that GNR became shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After the success of its platinum debut, “Appetite for Destruction,” the band took nearly four years to record its sophomore effort, which grew into two albums in the form of 1991’s “Use Your Illusion” records.

Aside from Rose, the only other person to straddle the old and new GNR is keyboardist Dizzy Reed. Toledo Free Press talked to Reed, in Cleveland, where the band had a stopover but no show was booked, about “Chinese Democracy,” the current tour and his friendship with Rose.

Toledo Free Press: Considering your hotel is literally a mile away from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, what are your thoughts on GNR’s chances of being a first-ballot inductee?

Dizzy Reed: No one has said anything to me about it, I’ve just heard about it because people have asked me about it. It would be an honor because of the other people that are there.

Toledo Free Press: Does GNR belong in the Rock Hall?

Reed: Sure, yeah, why not?

Toledo Free Press: Also, speaking of Cleveland, the last time GNR was in the Rock Hall City, Axl — after not taking the stage until well after midnight — famously fired opening band Eagles of Death Metal while on stage.

Reed: I sort of block that one out.

Toledo Free Press: For the band’s current tour, what are the set times like? Any late-night starts?

Reed: I haven’t been to a concert in so long I don’t know when the normal time is but we’ve been starting not late and we give a pretty long show. It’s a good three hours of rock ’n’ roll. We’ve been going on on time.

Toledo Free Press: From this reviewer’s standpoint, despite the hype surrounding “Chinese Democracy,” the album is pretty solid and definitely didn’t leave fans with the same under-whelmed feeling they experience when listening to new material from ’80s rock acts. Was there ever a point when you felt the project wouldn’t see the light of day?

Reed: Certainly there was a lot of disappointing moments with setbacks, but I never really gave up on it. I always thought it had to [be released]. It was too good.

Toledo Free Press: What “Chinese Democracy” tracks stand out in the current set?

Reed: All the ones we’ve been doing seem to have been working really well. I like playing “Street of Dreams,” it’s a treat for me to come out and play the piano. And I like some of the heavier stuff, it’s fun to play those. They seem to go over really well like “Shackler’s Revenge.” Sometimes it’s fun to do the heavier stuff.

Toledo Free Press: Something that does standout from a set list perspective is the epic “Estranged.” What’s it like to play that song again?

Reed: It’s kind of a beast for me, and for everybody, but it’s such a great song. At the end of the song you look out and people seem really appreciative to hear that again, so that’s been very cool. When we first started playing that way back when, before even the “Use Your Illusion” albums were out, it was almost kind of the opposite; people were scratching their head going, “What the hell?” But so many years later, they seem really into it and seem to really appreciate that we’re doing that song. It’s a lot of fun to play now.

Toledo Free Press: There are some fans that feel it won’t truly be GNR until the original lineup is back in the fold.

Reed: I’d say phooey. I can’t comment on that.

Toledo Free Press: How would you compare the current lineup to seeing GNR 20 years ago?

Reed: I think very kick-ass and possibly a little more sober, but not entirely.

Toledo Free Press: Considering you’ve been around the longest, does “Chinese Democracy” sound like GNR 1.0 or its GNR 2.0 lineup?

Reed: Is that computer lingo? Are you talking about the lineup?

Toledo Free Press: Let me rephrase, how are the two eras of GNR connected?

Reed: To me they’re connected because I’ve been around for the whole thing. Someone quit and we brought in somebody else. And that kept happening so I guess the main thing that links everything together really is the guy singing, Axl. He has that kind of voice, that’s what does it.

Toledo Free Press: As for Axl, his image in the media is as a megalomaniac among other things. Are these accurate portrayals?

Reed: I think most of it is cruel and malicious and unnecessary. I don’t think he’s like that at all. He’s a good friend. He’s like a brother.

Toledo Free Press: Is your relationship different with him than other people?

Reed: I don’t think so. We started writing songs for a new record so long ago, and I just wanted to see it through. It sort of became an obsession. And Axl gave me a shot, and I never really felt like I had any reason to turn my back on him. I wanted to finish.

Toledo Free Press: So why have you lasted with GNR after so many haven’t?

Reed: I’m just a determined mother******. I’m a loyal friend and a determined mother******.

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Wilson explores new territory with The Staving Chain

Having been firmly rooted in the blues for nearly two decades, Northwest Ohio native Dooley Wilson is a little timid about admitting where his initial inspiration came from.

“I think it really began before I picked up a guitar,” Wilson said in a phone interview with Toledo Free Press Star. “I have to admit, when I was 15, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” came out, and the solo from that song is the reason that I play guitar. Like I saw Slash doing that and — I feel a bit sheepish admitting this to the Toledo Free Press — but when I saw Slash doing that it changed my life. I was like, ‘I wanna do that! I can’t help it. I gotta do it.’ So, for better or for worse, that’s the road I took in life.”

While he never learned Slash’s note-by-note solo in “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” it marked the beginning of a long musical journey for Wilson, whose interest in Led Zeppelin as a teenager got him into Robert Johnson and led him to pursue the blues.

Dooley Wilson and The Staving Chain will play Manhattan’s on July 8. Photo by Erica Vance Hartmann

“By the time I was 19, I was just exclusively kind of militant about pursuing this style of southern, traditional blues,” Wilson said.

Since the early ’90s, Wilson has explored various forms of blues in groups such as Henry & June, Boogaloosa Prayer and the Soledad Brothers. After a jam session at the old Purple Gang house in Luna Pier last year, Wilson got inspired to start his latest venture. He is the vocalist and plays slide on the resophonic guitar for The Staving Chain, an authentic Delta blues outfit rounded out by John Roundcity (harmonica, mandolin, washboard), Todd Albright (acoustic guitar) and newest member Kassie Morrin (washboard).

On June 21, The Staving Chain released its self-titled, debut album on Danger Limited Sound Recording Company and will be playing at Manhattan’s on July 8 as part of a string of dates supporting the record. Staying true to the origins of Delta blues, The Staving Chain is exclusively acoustic. Albright plays a 1928 Stella, a guitar commonly used in old Delta blues.

“Culturally it’s very compelling, and it’s also humbling when you’re like a white guy from the suburbs because my life experience is so completely removed from the hardships that gave birth to that music and that culture,” Wilson said.

Don’t let Wilson fool you. The white kid from the suburbs has earned his stripes and become well-respected in the blues community over the years. In the fall of 2001, Wilson went down to New Orleans and worked on his chops for up to five hours a day as a street musician, alongside some of the best in the genre. In 2004 and 2005, Wilson traveled to Europe as a supporting act with the Soledad Brothers, whose connections with The White Stripes led to the Detroit rockers famously covering Henry & June’s “Goin’ Back to Memphis.”

“It’s a wonderful thing for me because it looks great on my résumé that The White Stripes cover my song,” Wilson said. “I had just come back home and was trying to get back on my feet again when I saw him cover that song on ‘Late Night [with] Conan O’Brien.’ I didn’t know whether to s–t or go blind. I felt so great.”

For a guy who has been honing his craft and fascinated by the blues since his late teens, the decision for Wilson to pursue the Delta blues with The Staving Chain was a natural progression, one that has him just as excited about music now as when he first heard “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

“There’s just nothing like it,” Wilson said. “It grabs me by the nuts and lifts me above the shite.”

Double trouble: Ozzy Osbourne, Slash to play The Palace on Feb. 12

Ozzy Osbourne has openly admitted he’s done a few things he regrets — something that isn’t surprising for a man whose former drinking habit took on legendary proportions and who lived up to his “Prince of Darkness” image through infamous incidents such as his decapitation of a bat with his own teeth during a concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

More recently, Osbourne has come to wish he hadn’t made statements to USA Today in 2008 that he would make two more albums and retire.

Ozzy

“Once upon a time, when I was 22, I said ‘You know what, I don’t think I’m going to live until after 40.’ That was OK until I was 39 and a half,’” Osbourne said during a recent telephone interview. “I suppose I could have been in a very depressed mood [when I talked about retirement], I don’t know. I’m not going to retire yet.”

Osbourne certainly isn’t acting like someone who wants to exit stage left anytime soon. His newest CD, “Scream,” reached No. 4 on the U.S. charts and he is resuming the stateside leg of what promises to be an ambitious and extended world tour, including a stop with Slash Feb. 12 at the Palace of Auburn Hills. It’s not the kind of behavior one expects from an artist intent on winding down his career.

If the music on “Scream” will sound familiar to those acquainted with Osbourne’s past work, the making of the CD was different in a couple of significant ways.

Unlike previous albums, “Scream” was written entirely in the studio, with Osbourne collaborating with his producer, Kevin Churko, in writing and arranging the songs.

“We would do the music together,” Osbourne said. “He would say ‘What do you think of this?’ And I’d say it would be better if you did this and that. We just worked things out. It was great. I mean, when it comes to lyrics, I ain’t the best lyricist, so I like to have someone to bounce [ideas] off of. He’s very clever and it’s good for me to bounce off him.”

“Scream” also marks the debut of guitarist Gus G. It’s a major change, considering that over the years Osbourne’s guitarists have been the focal point of his bands, as well as Osbourne’s main songwriting collaborators on his albums.

Slots with Osbourne have made stars out of past ax men, such as the late Randy Rhoads and most recently Zakk Wylde.

But as Osbourne was getting ready to make “Scream,” it was clear that Wylde, who fronts his own band, Black Label Society, wasn’t going to be involved in the project. That was the main reason Churko stepped in as such a key contributor to the album’s songwriting.

“Zakk had gotten sick with blood clots,” Osbourne said, referring to the health issue that forced Wylde to cancel tour dates in summer 2009. “He’d been doing double duty. He’d been doing my gig and his own. I knew eventually I’d have to get somewhat of a permanent replacement for Zakk, and so now was the time, because people were saying I was starting to sound like Black Label Society, which is very possible because he is Black Label Society. And you know what, Zakk’s a [bleeping] fine player, one of the greatest players I ever worked with in my life. And he’s still a good mate of mine. We still communicate.”

Fans should get a good chance to judge Gus G., as Osbourne continues what is supposed to be 18 months of touring. The tour started with a string of six Ozzfest dates in the summer — the first time the tour had happened since 2007.

For the 2007 Ozzfest tour, organizer (and wife of Osbourne) Sharon Osbourne broke ground by making Ozzfest free. Some saw it as a last-ditch attempt to save the festival, which had seen declining attendance in years leading up to that 2007 run.

In 2008, Ozzfest returned for a single show in Dallas, and then was absent from the concert scene in 2009. The brief six-date trial run for Ozzfest in 2010 was how Ozzy Osbourne wanted it.

Now back headlining, Osbourne is promising some musical surprises in his show.

“I mean, I’m not going to just play the [usual] Sabbath songs like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Paranoid,’” he said. “I’ve got choices on this one. Whatever songs I want to pull up instead of the classic songs I always do, I’m playing some of my solo songs. I’m playing a couple of songs I haven’t played on stage for a long, long time.

“I’m not going to tell you what they are because it would kill the surprise.”

Taking the lead: Slash in control of solo projects

Slash’s band, Velvet Revolver, may still be looking for the right singer.

But the guitarist didn’t have the same problem when it came to his recently released self-titled solo album. He found 13 of them.

Slash recruited a baker’s dozen of vocalists, each of whom took on lead vocals on one song on his CD (except for Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge, who sang two of the tracks.)

Slash

And he said the making of the “Slash” CD went smoothly despite the many vocalists and personalities involved.

“It was a very simple record to make,” the guitarist known as Saul Hudson to the Social Security Administration said in a recent phone interview. “It wasn’t complicated and it wasn’t fraught with issues or ego problems or anything like that. It was very, very, sort of casual and relatively simple. Just coming in and doing it, hanging out for awhile and take off. It was one of those things that could have been a real hassle, but it wasn’t.”

Slash said the idea to do this sort of album first began to form before singer Scott Weiland left Velvet Revolver in spring 2008, essentially forcing that band to the sidelines. But even when the band was active, Slash had been in demand to play guitar on album projects by other artists.

Slash said he realizes he could have made a CD that put more of the spotlight squarely on his talents, but that thought didn’t excite him.

“Everybody would probably imagine, oh, he’s going to do an instrumental with a lot of guitar solos on it,” Slash said. “I couldn’t think of anything that would be more uninteresting for me to do.”

The fact is, even with a lot of outside involvement, the CD was very much Slash’s project.

“I hired the producer, I hired the band and everybody else involved,” he said. “Then I would just call up the singers who would come down and sort of write. It was sort of like my crazy little excursion.”

And the project very much started with Slash, who took the lead as the songwriter.

“I just sat down and wrote a bunch of music,” he said. “Then I would listen to the music and it would sort of dictate to me who would be the appropriate singer. And then I would seek out the vocalists, song by song, and send them the demo and sort of impress upon them that it was a completely open forum, that they could do whatever they wanted with the material and it was subject to their interpretation and all that kind of stuff.”

The amount of input each singer offered varied, Slash said.

“Like with Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas), we did the music exactly the way I wrote it,” Slash said. “She sang to exactly what I wrote. We didn’t change anything. That happened a lot on the record. But then with Kid Rock, with M Shadows (of Avenged Sevenfold), we worked on those songs from the ground up. They really had an idea of the parts they wanted to do. When we did ‘By The Sword’ with Andrew Stockdale (of Wolfmother), he came up with these really great chord changes for the sort of chorus section of the song. So every song had a different input from the singer.”

The songs that made the “Slash” CD show surprising variety from the guitarist. “Crucify The Dead” (featuring Ozzy Osbourne) is the kind of eerie rocker one might expect on one of the former Black Sabbath singer’s own albums. “Beautiful Dangerous” (featuring a full-throated performance by Fergie) is a stomping dance-rocker. Meanwhile, “Promise,” puts Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell into a brooding but hooky pop-rock setting. And Iggy Pop cuts loose on “We’re All Gonna Die,” a track that merges garage rock and moody metal.

Slash, of course, was a key figure in Guns N’ Roses’ fast rise to the forefront of the hard rock scene on its 1988 debut album, “Appetite For Destruction” (18 million copies sold in the United States alone) and the two-CD 1991 follow-up “Use Your Illusion I/Use Your Illusion II.” His searing guitar work was one of Guns N’ Roses’ main signatures.

But Axl Rose was the leader of the band, and as relationships began to sour, the members of the band’s classic lineup were all fired or left, with Slash bowing out to form his own band, Slash’s Snakepit, in 1995.

In 2002, Slash and his former Guns N’ Roses bandmates, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum, decided to form a new group, Velvet Revolver. Things came together with the addition of guitarist Dave Kushner and especially former Stone Temple Pilots singer Weiland.

Eventually, though, conflicts with Weiland emerged and the singer returned to Stone Temple Pilots. Velvet Revolver, though, never broke up and has been compiling audition tapes from singers for the past couple of years.

Slash said Velvet Revolver could return to action later this year. The group got together in October to review audition tapes for a new singer, and there are reports that the band may have zeroed in on its new vocalist.

“Once we find a singer, that will really sort of dictate what the future of the band’s going to be,” Slash said.

As for Guns N’ Roses, rumors of a reunion of the classic lineup continue to pop up from time to time, despite what appears to be pretty much a nonexistent relationship between Rose and the other former band members. The fact that the band will be eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 has spurred speculation that it might at the least regroup to perform at the ceremony.

Slash wasn’t going to show his hand when it came to the Hall of Fame or prospects of some sort of reunion.

“I know we’ll be eligible, and when that time comes, we’ll deal with it (performing) then,” he said.

For now, Slash’s main priority is touring. His band includes Kennedy on vocals, Bobby Schneck on guitar, Todd Kerns on bass and Brent Fitz on drums, and Slash said he likes what he hears on stage. He will open for Ozzy Osbourne Feb. 12 at the Palace of Auburn Hills.

The live set encompasses Slash’s entire career, from Guns N’ Roses through Snakepit, Velvet Revolver and the self-titled solo album.

“It’s cool because since it’s my solo tour, I can do whatever I want and I can play stuff from my entire catalog, whereas in Velvet Revolver and even Snakepit, I have to concentrate on that particular band,” Slash said.